Cincinnati Review

Pauletta Hansel details her experiences with the literary community in Cincinnati.

Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: This hybrid, elliptical piece draws from the language of fairy tales to illuminate the experience of adolescence (perhaps; in part), as one character is “a little girl on some days and a young woman on others.” With references to violence and the body—as well as an allusion to the environment in …

Sanctuary Sound effects are a parallel life made of common materials wood blocks for hooves et cetera I hear thunder above a prairie I know to be shaken aluminum I know there is a horse under it not needing to be fed or broken Diction Great wheel pushing the river behind it Under it the …

Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: In this poem—from her series imagining different cabinet members who preside over particular parts of the pysche—Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer scrutinizes the challenges of speech, in particular where our words come from. In spare lines, carefully lineated, we see the results of a divine gift of fire: Not so much “let there …

I Watching Black Sea sand draw away from your feet the lateness of faith—that teetering while slumped over a phone. That someone of the same hamlet knows little of it, of others of it. A menagerie of pottery shards and sheepskin. That a hermit is to others merely a country: a painting of a woman …

Norman Finkelstein pays homage to poets who’ve gone before.

In this poem from issue 20.2, Haley Leithauser offers some ideas for how to eat the moon.